Chapter 8
By Michael Stevenson
The year is 1989 and it is now time for me to get serious about DXing and shortwave radio once again after playing around with a Sony ICF-7600D and an old Yaesu FRG-7. Looking at all the various tabletop communications receivers that were around at this time from Kenwood, Icom, Yaesu, JRC, Drake and of course the commercial ones of Ten Tec and Watkins Johnson and a few others, I still really could not afford a commercial receiver even though I would have dearly loved to have one, even the top JRC was a little on the expensive side for me so it really boiled down to Yaesu, Icom and Kenwood, the Yaesu did not have as many features on offer as the Icom and Kenwood even though it was cheaper, I decided to opt for the Kenwood because I could try before I had to buy with a local dealer stocking an R-5000, it was worth about $1500 Australian, very similar price to the Icom.
The Kenwood R-5000 was and still is a superb receiver with just about everything that a DXer could wish for in a radio (except for DSP which of course was not really very widely available in those days and was extremely expensive). It has direct entry tuning with a keypad, selectable stepped tune up/down buttons and smooth continuous tuning with digital readout to 1 Hz with a large central tuning knob which also had two VFOs which means you could tune to two separate frequencies at any one time and simply switch between the two, really great for ship to shore which was on two separate frequencies on SSB in those days, there was also 100 memory presets, it had IF shift and an IF notch filter which was great for reducing or eliminating QRM, a noise blanker which worked like any other in reducing impulse noise only (such as car ignition), it also had a fully variable RF gain control which I feel is far more useful than the switched variety, there was also two clocks and timers and a 3 position selectivity filter switch with the option of installing a wide choice of filter bandwidths, I had wide at 6 kHz, medium narrow at 2.7 kHz and very narrow at 1.8 kHz which were all very useful indeed. There was also an AGC switch for fast, slow and off.
The Kenwood R-5000 was a very sensitive and selective receiver with rock solid stability, a very capable performer indeed and I did a few years of very serious DXing pulling out lots of African, Asian and Latin American stations all with a simple longwire antenna.
As a matter of interest, a year after getting the R-5000, a customer dropped in an Icom IC-R71A which was from the same era, there was not really much wrong with it so I quickly serviced it and took it home for a comparison with the Kenwood, both are very similar performing radios and I would be very happy to have been using either at that time.
1993 came along and some big bills came in and I was becoming strapped for cash, something had to go and it had to be the Kenwood so I sold it off for $1000 and once again I was no longer able to DX or listen to shortwave and it remained so until 1999, this will be the beginning of my next era of SWLing and the next installment. The Kenwood R-5000 was a very sensitive and selective receiver with rock solid stability, a very capable performer indeed and I did a few years of very serious DXing pulling out lots of African, Asian and Latin American stations all with a simple longwire antenna. I would have to say that the Kenwood was the best receiver I have ever owned and used and I think that it would take a damn good modern receiver of today to be able to beat it (DSP aside that is!) unless one had a good commercial grade receiver that is!
As a matter of interest, a year after getting the R-5000, a customer dropped in an Icom IC-R71A which was from the same era, there was not really much wrong with it so I quickly serviced it and took it home for a comparison with the Kenwood, both are very similar performing radios and I would be very happy to have been using either at that time.
1993 came along and some big bills came in and I was becoming strapped for cash, something had to go and it had to be the Kenwood so I sold it off for $1000 and once again I was no longer able to DX or listen to shortwave and it remained so until 1999, this will be the beginning of my next era of SWLing and the next installment.
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